This Month I Will Appearing In: The GRIND

There’s not a whole lot left of this month left to be fair, but those behind GRIND Journal still seem eager to get the online magazine released before the end of the month! I’ve been following GRIND now for a couple of months, and no – it’s not some NSFW burlesque S&M magazine (though I kind of wish it were now, having my poems published in something like that would be kind of epic). GRIND Journal is ‘a journal of fiction and visual art for artists in Scotland and the Scottish diaspora’, and I’ve been following it since the very beginning.

It’s quite a new publication and came into being at the end of last year. I missed out in all the cool Glasgow happenings, but chanced upon the digital journal on Twitter. Not long later there was a second. And soon there will be a third – and I’m in it.

It’s a great magazine, with some lovely photography and very powerful poetry. I’ve also fallen in love with their mission statement:

We are here for the kind of people who work unmanageable hours in jobs they despise for wages that keep them hungry. We are here for the kind of people who use their Masters degrees and PhDs to clean piss off of toilet seats; the kind of people who cannot afford to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of art at the expense of all else. We’re here for the kind of people who will sacrifice all else for the pursuit of their art. Passionate people. People like us.

We’re not here to support the kind of people who tells others they cannot write, draw, paint, shoot or create because they have to work at the same time. That is an intolerable and myopic view of the arts that we refuse to subscribe to. We’re here to give people a voice and a platform that they may not have had before. We’re here to collaborate and bring people together, avoiding the schiamachy and cliques that plague the arts. We just want to help people get the recognition they deserve. The working world in the 21st Century is a cruel, unforgiving place. It gobbles up time and youth, infantilises people, turns creative minds to mush. You work more so you have more money so you can work less so you can focus on art which costs money so you work more.